‘Well, That’s 20 Years Down the Drain’ : Team of Employees Responsible for Company’s $480 Million Annual Profit Get Denied a $10 Raise, Leading to Expensive Malicious Compliance

Author image for Eleonora Bader
Eleonora Bader
Feb 25, 2023 10:00 AM EST

There is a reason people say that the richest are the stingiest — it happens to be true, a lot of the time. The type of people who pay with an Amex Black Card, yet ironically are the ones who don't leave their server a tip. A great example of such a person would be Hetty Green, nicknamed 'The Witch of Wall Street'. Today there are plenty of examples as well, although, unlike Hetty, they do turn on the heat and use hot water (Yeah, that gal was a cheap legend). u/CatFish21sm took to r/malicious compliance, sharing one company's stubbornness in giving their hard-working employees a raise.

These employees learned that they were responsible for over a third of the company's annual profit — yet were severely underpaid. They demanded a raise — all they wanted was $20 (they were a team of 12 people), which in comparison to $480 million seems laughable. But they did not receive it, so they vowed to maliciously comply to a point where the company would lose hundreds of millions.

Scroll down for the details. For more, check out these employees who weren't paid for mandatory meetings, and so planned their petty revenge.

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  • 01
    Font - r/r/MaliciousCompliance Posted by u/CatFish21sm 14 hours ago Malicious Compliance Costs Company Hundreds of Millions and Their Most Profitable Product. XL OC 8
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 02
    Font - So many years ago this person, lets just refer to them as Person. Person got a really great job working for a fortune 500 company. Not going to give any more specifics. But the company offered many benefits for their employees. They treated their employees like people and not like numbers. They offered a
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 03
    Font - yearly raise to anyone who worked there. This was meant to do several things, first of all it was meant to keep up with inflation so that employees wouldn't have to stress about money. I'm sure a lot of you know the struggle,
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 04
    Font - waiting for min wage to be updated so you can start saving money to hold over till the next wage increase. No the company was ahead of the curve.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 05
    Font - On top of that when they did start hiring new employees for more they increased the wage of anyone with that specific position by the same amount to keep older employees from earning less than newer employees. They offered many many other benefits aswell. Basically an awesome place to work for.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 06
    Font - Unfortunately it's a small town and the company wanted to expand that specific branch of operations. They couldn't do it here so they chose to move out. They sold the branch office building along with the product
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 07
    Font - that Person worked to another smaller company. When it was sold then person went with it, the old company made the new company sign a contract which guaranteed that the yearly bonus would stay around along with several other similar benefits.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 08
    Font - New company wasn't around very long and ended up expanding as well, they did the same thing, sold the location and product to another company. Unfortunately they didn't care as much about their employees and only treated them well because of contractual
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 09
    Font - obligations. So when they sold the location and product it did not come with a contract. New new company did care a little bit about employees, but ended raises and all of that. They would listen to employee complaints but
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 10
    Font - that was about it. They weren't around long either before the scummiest company came in and bought them out. So new company comes in and buys them out and immediately starts changing policies and
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 11
    Font - shifting everything up to make everyone jobs harder. Person and their team members got use to it and kept going. Now here's the thing about Person. Person works on a team of specialists, there are only about 12 people on the team and a manager that's over them. Well there was, I'll get to that.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 12
    Font - This team doesn't require any special education or anything but it does require a several week training course and several months of acclimation. The product is extremely delicate, and the customers for this product
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 13
    Font - more or less require perfection, anything short and no money. You must watch every single word that you say to these customers or they might write you off permanently. However, this is an extremely valuable product and the company makes a lot of money from it. Or they did atleast.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 14
    Font - Lets speed forward about 10-15 years The company has only found new ways to treat their employees less like humans since they took over and are somehow getting away with it. Turnover is high, but as long as they have high-school grads looking for a
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 15
    Font - job then they can keep their building full. Unfortunately Person and their team have asked for a raise several times at this point, they were always being turned down because they are earning "at market value" for their
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 16
    Font - position. Looked it up and market value is determined by a simple equation that takes into account other people in your profession at your experience level and with your job title within about 100 miles and calculates average wage for them. Considering the
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 17
    Font - extreme specialty of this position and being located in a remote region "market value" is determined by calculating the average wage of everyone on Persons team. Basically the company was saying "shut up we aren't giving you a raise."
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 18
    Font - Now, something to understand person and their team members weren't that disappointed not to get a raise every year. However they were now making only a little more than a new-higher with the company, and there are other
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 19
    Font - companies that do similar but less specialized work in the area but start people out at with a higher wage then person is making at this point. I literally knew high-school grads with 0 work experience that made more than person did. Now at this point
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 20
    Font - person has about 20+ years of experience working this specific product. And the least experienced person on their team had been working it for 12+ years.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 21
    Font - The straw that broke the camels back was an annual investors meeting that was streamed live to the entire company. Person, working on a small team was invited to take a few hours off to
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 22
    Font - watch the meeting. It was kind-of a reward for them for preforming so well. The company shot themselves in the foot with this one, though it was already starting to go south anyways, they just sped it up a little.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 23
    Font - So to put this into perspective for you guys the company total profit for that year (profit not earnings) was a little over 1.2 billion. Out of that 1.2 billion Persons team of 12 people (in a company hieing tens of thousands mind you)
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 24
    Font - these twelve people (and a manager) brought in about 480 million. That's a little over a third of the companies total profits for the entire year. For those that don't like math, that's about 40
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 25
    Font - million per person of pure profit. Person specifically earned a little over 60 million alone. The lowest earner on the team was over 20 million.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 26
    Font - Seeing that they were single handedly responsible for over a third of the companies total profit for the year the entire team got together and demanded a raise. The manager actually put that in before they even said anything,
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 27
    Font - even their manager thought it was wrong. They demanded $20 an hour. They actually only wanted half of that, but since they were being low-balled and completely unappreciated by the company for the work that they
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 28
    Font - did, the put in a higher number. BTW $10 is about the amount they would have been making with their yearly bonus had it never been discontinued.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 29
    Font - As you might expect the company being money hungry came back with the same response as usual, didn't even try to negotiate. They asked several more times over the course of a few weeks threatening to quit if they didn't get a raise and the company basically just said "Go on, anyone can do your Job."
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 30
    Font - Que malicious compliance. They didn't all quit only 3 of the 12, which if you've been keeping up would add up to on average 120 million dollars over one year. But that's not all actually what they did ended up turning out even
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 31
    Font - worst for the company. The rest of the team all agreed to only work their minimum requirements. The company had minimum requirements that everyone had to meet, this team up to this point being proud of
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 32
    Font - the work they put in consistently exceeded the requirements many times over. They would compete to see who could preform the best, the lowest earner on this team often exceeded minimum requirements by three times over.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 33
    Font - At the end of the year the company had to painfully explain to investors why their highest earning department was now preforming at less than half what it did the previous year, they came up with some stupid
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 34
    Font - explanations. They still refused to give a raise though, instead what they decided to do was raise their minimum requirements. At first the team kept up, but eventually out of aggravation when their constant requests for a raise were
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 35
    Font - denied about half of the team requested transfer off. They were transferred to other depts and replaced with brand new employees the most experienced of which had been with this company for about a year. These
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 36
    Font - new employees struggled to keep up with the minimum requirements, which kept getting raised to meet stock holder expectations. Eventually original member on the team had either quit or transferred to another dept even the manager.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 37
    Font - This left the team with only new employees who had absolutely no idea what they were doing, they completely alienated the vast majority of their former customers almost over night and if that wasn't' enough, because
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 38
    Font - they could not meed the extremely high demands of the company (still only a fraction of what the original team was preforming) they were either let go or transferred to another dept and replaced after only a few
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 39
    Font - months on the team. Even hieing several times the number of employees on that team did nothing. When they reported an earnings of 80 million from that team the company got so fed up with it that they just sold the product to another company for an enormous loss.
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 40
    Font - Unfortunately this isn't one of those "The company drove themselves out of business” stories but I still think it's pretty funny and I like to tell it to all of my new friends. I also use it to warn anyone who might be
    via u/CatFish21sm
  • 41
    Font - considering going to this company to work. Honestly, you'd think that if someone earns that much profit for your company you'd atleast try to keep them around.
    via u/CatFish21sm

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humor salary millionaire job malicious compliance work life company-annual-profit quit horrible-management petty revenge raise cheap-boss overworked-employees funny
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